Dracula: Starring David Suchet and Tom Hiddleston

Tom Hiddleston (The Night Manager) stars as Jonathan Harker, with David Suchet (Poirot) as Dracula in Liz Lochhead's powerful BBC radio adaptation of the classic novel by Bram Stoker. When solicitor Jonathan Harker sets off for Transylvania to sell the mysterious Count Dracula a Gothic mansion, his bride-to-be, Mina, begs him to stay - to no avail. But on arrival at Dracula's castle, deep in a black forest surrounded by wolves, Harker wishes he had listened to his fiancée.

Hidden Killers

Jane Tennison, a young, inexperienced WPC, learns the hard way never to take anyone - or anything - at face value, whether in her dealings with her police colleagues or when confronted by seemingly innocent suspects. Hidden Killers sees Jane acting as a decoy prostitute, with the hope of capturing a suspect wanted for numerous sexual assaults. The attacker is drawn in and put under arrest. Commended for bravery in the case, Jane is given CID status and moves from Hackney to Bow Street Station as detective.

A Life in Parts

Bryan Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father, a struggling actor and director, cast him in a commercial. Soon Bryan was haunting the local movie theater, reenacting scenes with his older brother. Acting was clearly his destiny - until one day his father disappeared. As a young man on a classic cross-country motorcycle trip, he found himself stranded at a rest area in the Blue Ridge Mountains. To pass the time, he read a tattered copy of Hedda Gabler, and in a flash he found himself face-to-face with his original calling.

Empire of the Sun

From the master of dystopia, comes his heartrending story of a British boy’s four-year ordeal in a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account of a boy’s life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai - a mesmerising, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches. It blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Brendon says:"War story unlike any other war story."

Publisher's Summary

From the author of the Sunday Times best seller Cocaine Nights comes an unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control.

Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on "enemy" floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for riots and technological mayhem.

In this visionary tale of urban disillusionment from the renowned author of Crash and Cocaine Nights, society slips into a violent reverse as the isolated inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a dystopian world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

The audiobook of High Rise arrives as interest in the book and J.G. Ballard’s work reaches a new peak. The film adaptation of High Rise, directed by Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers) will be released in September 2015, starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss.

Tom Hiddleston, who is known to millions worldwide for his role as the evil god Loki in the blockbuster Thor and Avengers movies, has lent his voice to this first UK audiobook adaptation of High Rise, which was published in 1975.

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His memoir, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.

What the Critics Say

"Ballard’s finest novel.... A triumph” (The Times) "Another eerie glimpse into the future. A fast-moving, spine-tingling fable of the concrete jungle.” (Daily Express) “A gripping read, particularly if you like your thrills chilly, bloody and with claims to social relevance.” (Time Out)

High-Rise is one of the best books by J. G. Ballard, one of the most distinctive and influential writers of the last fifty years. A sort of Lord of the Flies with grown ups it tells of how a luxurious apartment building for affluent professionals descends into savagery as their primal urges overwhelm their veneer of civilization. An important book and well worth experiencing.My only quibble is the narrator. Tom Hiddleston is a fine actor, a well-known name and the obvious choice as he plays the lead in the forthcoming feature film directed by Ben Wheatley. But I have been slightly spoiled by hearing Sean Barrett and William Gaminara read other works by Ballard for Audible and they are both outstanding interpreters of Ballard and while Hiddleston does a very good job as reader a screen actor turning his hand to reading an audiobook isn't quite as polished as those experts.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

David

3/07/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"A highly disturbing vision"

I bought this in anticipation of Ben Wheatley's forthcoming film version. Was delighted to find that Tom Hiddleston was the narrator and, given he can seemingly do no wrong, I was not surprised by the strength of his performance. Now I'm even more excited for the film. Highly recommended.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Jack87

18/06/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Brilliantly dark"

A brilliant and disturbing novel about social breakdown among well-heeled residents in an exclusive tower block. Ballard writes with a cool detachment while exposing the darkest desires of the urban middle classes. Well read by Tom Hoddesdon - highly recommended overall

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

James

Chester, United Kingdom

3/04/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Well-read"

It is very well-read, but the novel itself is a little too pleased with its over easy slide into violence. Lord of the Flies is not a bad analogy, but Golding's may be the truer statement of man's innate tendency to evil. Here, certain beats seem to be missing in order fully to convince that, yes, this is how things turn out when the middle classes and privileged are willingly corralled. Don't they, as a rule, tend to turn on those outside their ivory walls, and not those who share the same space? As nightmares go, this one seems to hit a chord with others I don't quite identify. That said Hiddleston is very good, Ballard is a hypnotic and original eye, and there are some excellent set pieces.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Si

UK

13/12/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Awful"

This book reads like an exercise for a sixth form psychology class, or an abstract of a Big Brother reality-type show. The events are unconnected and absurd, the characters are nothing more than place-holders to illustrate the author's concept of human behaviour and the whole thing is delivered in broad exposition about as dull as a 1970s textbook. I was prompted to read the novel having heard Ben Wheatley has adapted it to film; I wish I hadn't bothered.

6 of 9 people found this review helpful

Jai K.

7/07/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Fantastic"

Great book by BallardGreat insight into the heart of darkness lurking under our civilisation but also Ballard playing out again in another guise his view of humanity after living through the the Second World War has it affected life in Shanghai as a boy.

Hiddleston is a great narrator

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Kaggy

United Kingdom

12/11/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Lord of the Flies but with adults"

This story taps into the notion that any attempt to engineer lives and build a model community is fraught with problems. The characters occupy a beautiful sky-rise building equipped with swimming pools, shops and everything they need to lead a gracious and happy existence. Their lives should be perfect but sadly humans simply cannot help themselves. It seems that even when a person is highly educated and wealthy, the primitive urges and resentments are always just bubbling under the surface and ready to explode at the slightest provocation. Despite its extreme violence there is nothing in this book that is beyond recognition and that is why it is such an effective and believable nightmare. Let’s face it, we have all heard a childless person expressing their dislike of children, parents resenting the lack of tolerance of their darling offspring and the squabbles between pet and non-pet owners when a four legged friend strays onto another’s property. Most of this is mundane and forgettable, but occasionally darker events can occur.

This is a story about territory and how our desire to protect it can lead to madness, chaos and the ultimate destruction of the very thing we are trying to guard. It is a great listen, beautifully read by Tom Hiddleston, (who is starring in the up and coming film). If you have just paid a deposit on that dream pad in Canary Wharf, you might want to re-consider after listening to this.

4 of 6 people found this review helpful

MazP

UK

1/04/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"A chilling alternate reality"

Having recently read this novel in anticipation of Ben Wheatley's film adaptation, it was good to have the opportunity to hear the story read by one of its stars. Hiddleston's reading of the text seems to bring out the unsettling nature of the tale by its very calm clarity. The characterisations and accents of his co-stars are convincingly carried off, and I think that this will be a great companion to the film. This story of anarchy in a high class tower block is not for the faint hearted, and since Ballard's writings are turning out to occasionally be prophetic, it makes you wonder what really goes on behind the closed doors of the rich.

4 of 6 people found this review helpful

P1969

8/09/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Typical Ballard"

I should say from the outset that I haven't read Ballard chronologically, but I appreciate that this is quite an early response to the skyscraper phenomenon that informed social housing in the 1970s and might tell us a lot about why vertical living isn't doing urban communities any good. The trouble with this book is that its argument is the same that informs earlier works such as The Drowned World and later works (Crash, Millennium People, Super Cannes): bourgeois mores are a superficial veneer beneath which lurk much more primal needs and desires that any deterioration of circumstances brings to the surface. Gender roles revert under pressure to something approaching the jungle law. Class is ingrained and will always re-establish itself after some pseudo-egalitarian vacuum. Our dependence on machines, technology and concrete blunts our skills and perception until a crisis occurs. We are a naturally violent species. and the protagonist is the same protagonist in most Ballard narratives. No doubt this is well-written, sharply observed, expertly paced, but I have read this before; only the setting was different. It is very interesting though, from the point of view of our digital age, that something as banal as an elevator in a high-rise building could become the lynchpin of human resourcefulness and survival. We are now so much more gadget-dependent that Ballard's dystopian vision seems a little over-anxious and a little quaint. We have not (yet) collapsed into a primeval swamp of ineptitude or descended into some existential violence between ghetto-ised tribes of techno-societies. Very little is written now about anxieties surrounding technologies because writers fear the swift obsolescence of their plot devices (Eggers' The Circle about the googlification of the world isn't lukewarm because of his use of technology but because of limp characterisation and clumsy plotting).I think Ballard's pessimism was well-placed, though. We are violent; that violence does not need to manifest itself in murder and mayhem and the raiding of food shelves in supermarkets. It is now institutionalised in the so-called free market and produces urban social engineering: the rich build, buy, renovate, move in (or not) and push the poor out into peripheral ghettos. No bones broken...

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

Amazon Customer

6/12/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Indescribable"

For all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the High Rise..There are no words to describe the beauty and brilliance of this bizarre tale

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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